It's a Keeper

We had our first frost/freeze this week. This time, I took the weatherman's warnings to heart and went out to strip the tomatoes off the only garden plant that survived the difficult summer -- a grape tomato plant that had been an "extra" and went in a large flower pot beside the swimming pool. The plant grew to be HUGE and was covered with tomatoes about the size of my thumb or smaller. Unfortunately, most of those tomatoes were green. I say "unfortunately" because the only things I knew to do with green tomatoes are make relish (which my family just doesn't eat) or fry them (which I've never had success doing). But unwilling to let them go to waste, I picked them all and got two 5-quart buckets full of a mix of ripe, nearly ripe, and green tomatoes.

Then I consulted "The Google" (as my sister calls it) and found a recipe for green tomato soup. Now, allow me a little side story here. We all have those days when we're tired of our jobs and fantasize about what else we might be doing, right? Unlikely as it might seem, my husband and I have a fantasy that we could run a restaurant that specializes in soup. I can see it in my head - we would buy an old house with "character" and fill it with flea market furniture so it has an eclectic atmosphere. The menu would be nothing but soup and the stuff one might like to eat with soup - cornbread, breadsticks, crackers. Maybe very simple sandwiches and cookies. And coffee drinks (although neither of us drinks real coffee - but this is a fantasy, right! Ha ha).  There would be some soups that would be staples of the menu, but one of the attractions of this restaurant would be the "daily special" - some kind of soup that is different. So I'm always on the lookout for recipes I could use in my fantasy soup kitchen someday.

Enough of that. I tried the green tomato soup recipe with a little apprehension as to whether the family would like it - I mean, green tomatoes? Soup?  But it turned out to be excellent! It was also very simple to make. It has ham, a mix of green and red tomatoes, and a jalapeno pepper, and that's about it.  (The red stripes in the picture are skins from the red grape tomatoes - I probably should have peeled them, although they didn't detract from the flavor or texture of the soup, and hey, they add that fiber we all need....) It was just perfect with a big chunk of fresh cornbread crumbled in.  Even my daughter declared the recipe to be a "keeper." So this weekend I'm going to chop and freeze all the additional green tomatoes so we can have another batch (or three) this winter.

Maybe someday you can stop by the fantasy soup kitchen and have yourself a big bowl of hot green tomato soup!

Here's a Switch...

In my last post about "Try It Out Tuesday," I said my husband likes just about anything I cook, and that I hadn't yet found something my daughter would eat. Well, tonight turned all that on its head!

I found a recipe for Three Cheese Stuffed Shells in an older Taste of Home magazine. This is the first time I've ever cooked with ricotta cheese, and it was sort of fun to make the filling and stuff the little limp pasta shells. I might have put in too much spaghetti sauce, but I thought it came out looking pretty well:

It was really, really rich! Two shells was almost more than I wanted. That might be one reason the hubby didn't like it - he spooned three shells out to start with. He said he doesn't like the texture of the ricotta.

The kids, however, did clear their plates, and when I asked if this was a recipe to keep, my daughter said, "Well, I don't want to have it every night." But she agreed it would be something we could put in the menu rotation.

The last thing I would say is, don't laugh at my fancy garlic bread! : )

A Sense of Accomplishment

I may have mentioned at some point that I've been writing a novel. : ) This past Saturday morning, my husband and daughter went spelunking with a friend, and my son was sleeping in after a hard week of high school. So I decided to forego the work I brought home from school to spoil myself by a day of working on the edits for my book instead. Well, I became consumed with the task and ended up spending the entire Labor Day weekend editing (I did go to church, do laundry, and keep the family fed!). Last night around 10:00, I finally typed "The End" and closed the file with a sense that the book was finally finished

It's been a long process. I first had the idea for these characters about 25 years ago, but it wasn't until about seven years ago that I actually started writing. My first draft was 169,000 words, which is down to about 92,000 in the final draft. For a while I was stuck in the middle of the story, unable to explain why some of the scenes were included. But after "killing a few babies" (as the agent blogs call it), I feel satisfied that everything finally ties together into a tight plot package. For the first time, there's nothing I think I need to change.

Of course, I've heard authors say there is always something to change, even after the book is published. But at this moment, I feel pretty happy. And excited, because now I'm going to dive right back in to the first draft of the sequel to this book. That will be fun!

A quick update on "Try It Out Tuesday": We didn't try anything new for the main dish tonight because the kids had a practice meet for their cross country teams and weren't going to be home to eat. But I did try a new cookie recipe. It's called Orange Chocolate Drops. The story of how I got this recipe is kind of funny. You may remember I said I was going to let my daughter pick the new dish for this week since she didn't like the dishes the other two weeks. So Thursday evening of last week I mentioned to her that she needed to pick something out so I could get the ingredients needed. On Friday, she went to the school library and checked out a big, old cookbook. Then she and one of her friends looked through the book and picked out four recipes, including Five-Cheese Pasta (FIVE cheeses!!!????) made from scratch, not from a jar. This is a cookbook for REAL cooks. Yikes....

One of the four recipes was this cookie recipe. I'm not sure I like it much. I haven't eaten one of them yet (don't want to eat too close to bedtime), but they are sort of small and there weren't really very many (only 2 1/2 dozen) and they seem like they may be sort of dry. My son did try one, and he announced they are "not poisoned" (family joke - someone always has to try the cookies fresh out of the oven to be sure they are safe for everyone else). I'm not sure if that was an endorsement, ha ha.

"Try It Out Tuesday"

This has absolutely nothing to do with reading or with writing, but my family is engaging on a little adventure, and I thought it might be fun to write about it. With school starting up, I made my annual resolution to make a menu since knowing what to cook for supper each night really helps to eliminate stress (and also cuts down on the grocery bill, and cuts down on the amount of food growing fuzzy white or black or green stuff in my refrigerator!). While I was writing out the first menu, I seemed to be planning for the same stuff as always. I was looking through a cookbook for a recipe and saw a picture of a Crab Louis Salad. "That looks good," I thought, then, "Why don't I make that?" And thus was born the idea for "Try It Out Tuesday."

Every Tuesday night this school year, we are going to try some entirely new recipe that we've never eaten before. My hope is to get some things I can add to the menu rotation -- and to experience some interesting new tastes. Last week, I did make the Crab Louis Salad (with imitation crab, of course - this IS Arkansas, after all). The guys in the family liked it really well; I was only so-so about it, but would eat it again. My daughter didn't eat hers at all.

Tonight we tried Irish Tacos, a recipe I found from an app on my phone (All Recipes Dinner Spinner). It was really simple to make, which is nice after a day at school. Basically, the taco is made of corned beef, coleslaw, and a simple yogurt sauce on a warmed tortilla. I used thin-sliced corned beef sandwich meat (I didn't want to invest in the $20 corned beef roast in case we didn't like it), which I cut into thin strips and warmed. The yogurt sauce called for fresh cilantro, which I think I would have liked in the dish, but I no longer have a cilantro plant thanks to the drought this summer. The sauce has a pretty aggressive taste on its own, and I was afraid at first that it would overpower the taco. However, when the three tastes were layered in the taco, they blended together nicely so that nothing was overpowering.

My husband and I both liked the tacos (of course, my husband is very easy to please; he claims it comes from growing up in a family of 12 children, lol). My son pronounced them "too sour"; my daughter took two bites and quit. I'm 0-for-2 with her on "Try It Out" night so far! Maybe I should have her pick next week's recipe....